CHAPTER I THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN ANCIENT TIMES AND IN THE MIDDLE AGES It may be said that, broadly speaking, all philosophy grew out of mythology; but this is especially true of that branch of philosophy which deals with the questions of the existence and the attributes of God. It is evident that these problems arose out of reflections suggested to the human mind by the popular beliefs which lie at the root of every religion. Logically, then, the history of religion should have preceded the history of philosophy; but we shall not go so far back; we shall merely give a brief account of the earliest religious conceptions of the Greeks, as far as they can be discovered through the works of their earliest poets, through the Theogony of Hesiod and the poems of Homer. Greek Theology: The Poets; Hesiod and Homer. Hesiod taught that the world came out of chaos through the operation of Love. ... "... Foremost sprang Chaos and next broad-bosomed Earth ever secure seat of all Immortals . . . and dark dim Tartarus in a recess of Earth having broad ways, and Love who is most beautiful among immortal gods, Love that relaxes the limbs. . . . But from Chaos were born Erebus and black Night, and from Night again sprang forth Aether and Day, whom she bare after having conceived by union with Erebus in love" (Theog. 116 et seq.). We find the same theogony in the myth of the birds related by Aristophanes in his comedy of that name (Birds, V, 191). This appears to have been the most ancient form of Greek theology, and it corresponds to a certain extent with what we can learn of the theology of the Phoenicians from the testimony of Sanchuniathon (Philo Byblius ap. Eusebius, Praepar. Evang. I, c, VI). It is, as we see, a kind of pantheistic naturalism, in which everything comes out of chaos, through the operation of forces which lay dormant within it and by which it is transformed. In Homer's theology we find quite a different tone and a different spirit. This pantheistical and naturalistic cosmogony becomes an anthropomorphism that is not far removed from theism. Jupiter is the supreme ruler (üπαтos μnστwp), who arranges and directs all things; all the forces of the universe are subject to his authority. In the highest place in the empire of the gods, Jupiter stands alone as the ideal of supreme power and absolute intelligence. He presides over the assemblies of the gods, and he holds communion with He is the father of Ate, who leads the guilty astray; of Remorse, by which offences are wiped out; of Pity, the avenger of the oppressed. He is the protector of the rights on which rest the relations between men, the supreme God of oaths and of the family. He watches over the habitations of men, is the patron of guests and suppliants, and even of beggars (see Jules Girard, Du Sentiment religieux chez les Grecs, pp. 71, 72). man. Notwithstanding the many noble thoughts which are to be found in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, the religion of the Greeks never rose much above mythology, and never became exactly what we call a religion. For the marks of a religion are three firstly, a revealer; secondly, a sacred book; thirdly, a system of metaphysics and of ethics. The Greeks had no revealer no man ever professed to be or was accepted among them as a sacred and privileged intermediary between God and man; they had no Manu, no Zoroaster, no Buddha. Nor had they any sacred book such as the Zend-Avesta or the Vedas, or the Koran. Lastly, they had no theology, that is, no metaphysical and moral doctrine evolved by a learned priesthood and regarded as above the private judgment of individuals. In Greece the poets were the theologians. To them alone was due the development of the religious and moral ideas implied in the popular beliefs. Some attempts at religious organization were, however, made, and these give us an idea of what the Greek religion might have become. Such were the mysteries of Orpheus and, one might even add, the Pythagorean Brotherhood. (See Jules Girard.) All these attempts, however, led to nothing, and the Greek religion remained a religion of the imagination, in which philosophers and poets took the place of metaphysicians and moralists. Let us now see how the religious notions of the poets were developed through philosophy. The Cosmogony of the First Greek Philosophers: The Ionic School; Xenophanes: Criticism of Polytheism; Pantheism of Xenophanes; Religious Scepticism; The Sophists. Before it grew into a theology, the earliest Greek philosophic system, that of the Ionic school, was a cosmogony; and it may be regarded as the translation into an abstract and scientific form of the mythological cosmogony. Aristotle traces the doctrine of Thales, who derived everything from water, to the ancient myth, according to which Ocean is "the father of Gods and men " (Arist. Metaph. I, 3). (Arist. Metaph. I, 3). But the cosmogony of Thales, though apparently materialistic, was inspired by a pantheistical conception. He said that all things were full of God, Táντα Tλýρn Oeŵv (Arist. De Anima, I, 5). He also thought the loadstone had a soul (Arist. I, 2, 405 a, 19). The first thinker who raised the conception of God to a philosophic plane, whether by combating popular superstitions or by defining the peculiar marks and attributes of Divinity, was Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic school. Xenophanes ridicules the polytheistic anthropomorphism. he says, make gods in their own image. Men, "Negroes imagine them as black and with flattened noses; the Thracians, with blue eyes and red hair; if oxen and horses could paint, they would represent their gods as horses and oxen" (Xenoph. Frag. 6 and 7; Cic. De Nat. Deor. I, 24). Homer and Hesiod represent the Gods as committing all the acts that are considered most disgraceful in men, such as theft and adultery (Cic. De Nat. Deor. I, 24). Xenophanes gave, according to Aristotle (De Xenoph. 3), an a priori proof of the unity of God: "If God is the most |